The Em Dash Conspiracy: More and More of Reddit Is from LLMs | Hacker News Reader

The Em Dash Conspiracy: More and More of Reddit Is from LLMs

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25 pointsdonchuru11 comments

Oh my. Although I understand, and I do truly, that the em dash might be a tell for LLMs...I have been using it for years, now, and the last time this came up on HN I understood exactly when: Mac OS makes it very easy to type the em dash. You just long press the regular -.

I don't use a Mac anymore, but the first thing I'll do on a Linux build is configure my modifier key in such a way to produce — easily.

Not to deny that discourse on the internet, and reddit of all places, might be getting infested with LLM output. I just don't think focusing on the em dash is a good strategy to predict a tell.

> Mac OS makes it very easy to type the em dash. You just long press the regular -.

Curious, this doesn't work for me. It does work for other characters, such as long-pressing 'n' to get variants such as 'ñ'.

I do use em dashes a lot though. I just use Shift-Option-hyphen.

I just auto-replace three hyphens in a row.

For the record, I want it known that I am still human — I am in here.

—Chief One in Eight Billion

Is this em dash thing some kind of joke? Or have people not notice that software (eg, iPhone keyboards) automatically insert the dashes when you type two hyphens in a row? (To type `--` and not `—` I had to type `- -` and then delete the space.)

There's a very clear trend line in the graph. Did iOS add this feature recently? Maybe a popular tiktok taught zoomers how to type em dashes?

A test would be to compare against technology-oriented subreddits where there isn't money on the table.

reddit has been pushing itself as an "app" more than a website recently, and killed off a lot of third party apps in a move that drove off some longtime users. could just be a sign of a changing userbase, but I won't write off the idea that reddit is becoming more inhabited by bots.

All of the measured subreddits in the linked repo also seem like grift-heavy subreddits to me. They're all the stereotypical "get rich selling pickaxes to miners" subs so seeing them infiltrated by "get rich using AI to sell pickaxes" seems almost expected to me.

I'm curious if the trend was similar across all subreddits with a broader set of topics.

Does it also convert '...' into '…'? Been seeing that a lot more recently. Also 'naïve' (outside of Raymond Chen's blog), that one seems to have been happening for longer though.

Personally, I can't stand such anti-features, and smartphone OSes seem to be full of them. Which is another reason besides the giant privacy invasion why some weird people (like me) don't use them or are aware of every new feature.

Go to the replacement AITA subreddit that went up after the blackout if you want to see an LLM conspiracy. Every top post is obviously fake ragebait.

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